look how all the kids have grown
by but seriously
Summary: He'd taken the Caravaggio. They'd taken his brother. Something has to give. / or, the one where I actually wrotes a Spies AU. FOR MATHILDE. HAPPY BIRTHDAY! [Caroline, Hayley, Rebekah, Elena, Bonnie; The Originals; ensemble; some K/C]


i started this last week but it's kind of been in the backburner, what with my finals coming up, and then yesterday I remembered in a panic that mathilde's birthday was coming up, and spent today frantically punching this monster out. anyway, this is for mathilde (the amazing theviolonist!), who asked for 50k of spies au fic for her birthday, and while i fully realize this is _far _from 50k, this was the best i could come up with in short notice, in its unbeta'd glory because _there was just no damn time_ and i _did __**not**__ want to miss out on posting this on your birthday._

this started out as klaus/caroline (a prompt by mathilde aaaaeons ago on my tumblr) but as i wrote more it became less about them and more about the girls—because GIRLS!—and every's going to hate this but whatever, i am secure in the knowledge that mathilde will love me no matter what crap i churn out.

i love you muchlys mathilde, and i hope you had an amazing birthday heart eyes emojis yaaaas. stay shady.

* * *

—

—

**look how all the kids have grown**

.

**part one: wish i may, wish i might**

**—**

"You do realize there's no use struggling?"

Is that polyester - oh God forbid, _not_ _polyester_ - covering her eyes? Yeah, from the feel of it Caroline's pretty sure it's made of recycled yarn, but doesn't this asshole _know_ that there's toxic monomers building in the fibres? Does this guy want to give her a skin rash in addition to trying to kill her?

She's counted one thousand, six hundred and fifty seconds and he's still halfway through his monologue, and if her eyes weren't plastered shut by this piece of fabric that Bonnie's told her has been known to trigger breast cancer (she'd been the one to hack into that med school in Boston without a single credit to her name) she'd have rolled her eyes all the way to Kansas.

"Are you going to kill me or what?" she asks. "Because it's my birthday, and I can think of other ways I'd rather be spending it."

She hears him chuckle, hears his clipped accent - she wonders if it's fake. She knows how to pick out the way people roll their R's and hack their aitches from two hallways down, but his is pretty convincing. But then again, back in the ballroom, and then there's the guy in the laundry chute—

Suddenly her blindfold's ripped off, and, woah - okay, could've sworn she'd felt her eyelids tingling. But it may just be her paranoia. She just thinks of these things, okay? Every alternative, every possible exit strategy. This is why it's her strapped to this chair and Bonnie decrypting codes in the back of a van one block down with the perfect view of the second floor corner-room where Hayley's doing countersurveillance.

"I always did love birthdays," her captor tells her conversationally, and if he weren't arranging some menacing looking pincers atop a metal sheet she'd be inclined to smile, but maybe today's just not her day.

"Past tense?" she asks. The duct tape's not giving one bit. She wriggles her ankles just the slightest, and - hello, leeway. "Did someone dump you on yours or something?"

He turns his blue eyes on her, adjusts the sleeves of his shirt. His bow tie is hanging loose around his neck, disheveled the way her evening dress is bunched up at her thighs. "You're surprisingly chatty for someone who's three seconds away from getting their molars ripped out."

"I'm the honeypot," she tells him mournfully. "It's my infectious smile, I've been told."

"And your toxic charm, sweetheart." He allows her a wolfish grin. "I bought you two drinks."

"One of which I poured down your pants," she sighs, a mockery of fondness, and she keeps her eyelashes batted while her ankle twists, and here we_ go_—

She flashes to her feet, swings the chair around so it smashes against his creepy table of torture instruments: bits of wood fly everywhere and her duct-taped hands slide through the handles - but he's grabbed hold of his knife and is slashing at her face, and - she blinks, flexing her hands. They're free.

"If we're going to roughhouse it, might as well make it a fair one." He says, pocketing his knife, already prowling into his battle stance.

Caroline grins back and rips her dress so the slit runs all the way to the black lace of her panties. His eyes track her thighs appreciatively, and he lets out a low hum. The way his lip curls is almost seductive, but she knows a thing or two about seduction. Elena's not the only one trained for this.

"Happy birthday to me, then," she says, and they're off.

—

Imagine if you will: a cinematic shot of sprawling green interrupted by the minute sounds of combat boots crunching through frozen grass, of sweat-frizzed hair whisping against the backs of dark jackets, of a commandeered van being pushed into a garage that seems much smaller from the outside by four silently panting girls.

Traipse up the grand staircase that is so prone to creak under the slightest pressure, press the pads of your bare feet into the learned spaces of dull wood brought to shine and marvel at how they don't make a sound, not one, not on this moonless night. They diverge in the hallway, one last lingering look before disappearing into their own rooms, whispers of _Happy birthday, Caroline_, snatched back into the shadows before they make it into Anna's room at the very end of the hall.

Caroline tumbles into bed, bruises fresh around her wrist that will likely turn blue and yellow in the morning – nothing a little concealer can't fix. Hayley dumps the bags into their shared closet, adrenaline running flush through her skin, before diving into her own bed.

Her eyes are bright against the softly flickering candles, vanilla incense wafting through the room, chasing away all traces of gunpowder that may or may not have been used. They haven't gone out yet; Caroline feels a faint sense of accomplishment even as she struggles to keep her eyes open.

She hears from the other end of the room, her patent rasp, "That is the last time I'm offering to be the getaway driver. I don't care whose birthday it is."

"Go to sleep, Hayley," Caroline mumbles into her pillow. If Hayley says anything after that, she doesn't hear it.

—

Caroline has an ache in her neck when she wakes up five hours later. She showers luxuriously, the hot water untangling the knots in her neck, and dresses quickly; steals some of Hayley's cover up to dab on her wrists. She can't find her own (it's probably Anna Johnson with her habit of 'borrowing' beauty products – without asking! – and then never bothering to return them). The Wolf is still asleep under her mountain of cushions and blankets despite running a temperature of a hundred and one all year round.

"Wake up," she jabs what she hopes isn't Hayley's face underneath all that futon and crushed velvet, "We have chem lab in thirty."

"M'not going," is her whined reply, and Caroline rolls her eyes and gives up. It's likely the brunette's going to show up forty minutes into class; tie askew and hair uncombed, throw an absolute bitch fest at her behind beakers for not trying harder to wake her up. Well, whatever. Hayley's total refusal to wake up early in the mornings was so not her problem. Maybe she could wheedle Bonnie to hack into the servers and give her a perfect attendance, but for now, all Caroline's thinking about is a glass of orange juice, and maybe some warm cinnamon rolls.

Gotta carb-load before PE later.

She meets Elena on the way down, her hair done up in pencils. She has dark circles under her eyes from last night, but her lips still look plump with kisses that looked like they'd bruised the inside of her mouth. Caroline's still trying to figure out if that was hot, or if Elena needs a trip to the dentist's pronto.

"There's a reason they call him the Augustine Vampire, you know," Caroline mutters out of the corner of her mouth. Elena has a stack of books in her arms, still keeping up the too-busy-studying-to-bother-with-your-dumb-parties façade she kept up to keep her aunt off her back. With her panda eyes she might just make off with it, but she doesn't tell Elena that. She's not that big of a bitch.

Elena rolls her eyes, shifts her books from one arm to the other. "He sucks you dry. Believe me, I know." She grimaces, but there's also a hint of a smirk there and – you know what? Caroline really doesn't want to know.

"Where's Bonnie?" is what Caroline does want to know while she's buttering her scones, and Elena replies around a bite of home fry, "Class, probably."

"Already?"

"She's like, half in love with Atticus."

"You think she's seducing him with her organic chem notes?"

Caroline finds herself nudged to the side: Hayley's shoved her way into the bench between them, looking grumpy. She plucks the scone out of Caroline's hand and crams it into her mouth. "Growing up with you, she might have picked up a thing or two."

Elena clicks her tongue. "Don't be petty, Hayley. Not everybody can ace Culture and Assimilation."

"When I need help undoing someone's pants, I'll call you." Hayley shoots her a tight smile and steals one of her home fries. "Status report."

"Organic chem," Caroline recites automatically, and Hayley smirks: her photographic memory and her eagerness about it was one thing she so loves to exploit. She doesn't blush as she would have three years ago, used to Hayley's brusque manner as she was, and went on, "study hall, then double PE. That's it."

Hayley sighs. "Double PE. Joy. I'm still sore from last night. In ways I could only _wish_ I was."

There's a collective groan around them. Despite their discrete tones it's still easy to eavesdrop, bright-eyed girls in high ponytails hungering for breakfast and early morning gossip between sips of coffee. Rebekah looks at them a little strangely, and Caroline feels a prickle of annoyance, already bracing herself for the questions to come—

"Where were you last night?" she asks Elena, but her eyes remain on Caroline's.

"I slept in Bonnie's room," Elena replies easily. She pops a blueberry into her mouth and chews slowly: Rebekah always did take her time. She swallows finally and smiles at them like she doesn't notice all of them staring at her, some of them with their breaths held.

Hayley's fingers grip Caroline's thigh under the table. Even through the worn plaid fabric, it stung.

"She has the extended version of Dirty Dancing," Elena continues, "and I have an affinity for Patrick Swayze's shoulders."

"Lady boner, Elena," Caroline corrects. "The apt term for it is lady boner."

Hayley nods approvingly. She retracts her claws.

"Funny," Rebekah says. "Because I asked to borrow it from Bonnie last Monday. It's still with me, in my _Vault_." Rebekah liked to stress on her Vault a lot, in some cases even taking to talking about it in capital letters, like it was some pandora's box filled with the secrets of the universe and the exact residences of former KGB hitmen (Caroline doesn't put it past her) instead of some a little steel safe filled with her personal shit protected by hydraulic-actuated vault doors.

"Well," Elena smiles, not missing a beat, "we don't go to spy school for nothing."

—

She used to live in Virginia, you know.

Spare her the look. _She_ knows.

Captain of the cheerleading squad, head of the Go Green! Campaign, top of her classes, and – God, someone should slap _overachiever_ on her forehead. But whatever, she's not embarrassed. And she used to date, too. She thinks she loved a boy once too, a boy with blue eyes and big, warm hands, but he broke her heart the night before the eighth grade formal and she'd broken his arm. After that, it was decided for her that she'd be better off at the academy, growing up among girls – exceptional girls, they were quick to add – girls just like you.

She'd expected some sort of lecture, or maybe like, a fine. Juvenile detention. Something. (Those guys that showed up at her house were pretty big and pretty scary.)

Instead, they teach her how to properly break a man's arm so it might never heal properly. And how to get away with it.

—

"You know you're going to have to break into that Vault of hers," Hayley whispers as soon as Atticus is out of earshot. Elena's assigned seat is across the room, but she reads Hayley's lips and rolls her eyes before tilting her head just the slightest in Rebekah's direction, _isn't she the worst?_

"Piece of cake," Caroline says, eyes trained on the sheet in front of her, some tricky mechanism type that's she's managed to extract a nasty-looking molecule with lots of different R-group types, but she can't for the life of her figure out what reacts and what shouldn't. Freaking Aldol condensations shouldn't be this hard; she'd broken through Sommers' decoding just last night for God's sake.

She's frowning at it so hard the paper might curl up and burn—Hayley sighs and snatches the sheet from her hands, scribbling down the right formulas, her own work sheet finished and stapled by her side. Caroline considers feeling offended, but she figures Hayley has a point. Rebekah's room is a floor above theirs and she'd tricked it out with motion sensors because the selfish bitch didn't like to share her hand creams imported all the way from London or something, and she needs to find a way in and out before the end of organic chem.

Usually she'd consult Bonnie about this – Bonnie knows this academy inside and out, her great-great-grandfather had helped built this place after all – but her seat to their left is empty. Odd.

Even Elena had shrugged at that. Atticus wore sweater vests on Wednesdays and Bonnie wouldn't have missed that for anything.

A few minutes later, Hayley knocks a beaker filled with something blue and smelling of sulphur right into Caroline's lap, soaking right through her lab coat, and she's excused to go change by a much-exasperated Atticus.

"Be back in a few minutes, Professor Shane!" Caroline chirps over her shoulders as she flounces off. Seven minutes and forty-two seconds, to be exact.

Forty-two seconds later she's standing in front of Rebekah's room with cobwebs in her hair after using a shortcut cutting through the kitchen's vents. The lock-picking's the easy part, but the motion detectors—

Caroline slips a metal ball into the room – it rolls until it hits the foot of Rebekah's bed, filling the room with cloudy white gas. The red lasers scattered across the floor flitting in and out of obscurity, and she rolls her eyes.

"Seriously?"

Kicking off her shoes, she cartwheels over a red beam crisscrossing its way to the bed, tumbles over double beams and hoists her weight onto her hands as a laser threatens to cut into her toes. Her back is still sore from last night, a flash of red and she remembers how her punches had come away wet with it, and she winces a little – almost stumbles right into a laser. She's about two feet away from the Vault and she's literally balanced on one hand as she tries to steady herself against a chair with the other. She curses Rebekah under her breath as she disables the alarms, jabbing her toes the buttons using the universal decoder Bonnie had cracked, and collapses onto Rebekah's woven rug as the lasers disappear. Paranoid much?

It takes another two minutes to break into the Vault, slipping the DVD out from where it's hidden behind her shirt, the cover clammy from her light sweat. She considers leaving a note behind, _get a better Vault_ _or a better name_, but she's almost out of time: she slams it shut and hears the bolts slide back into place, taps another code into the panel and scampering out of there before the lasers start up again, daring to congratulate herself on a job well done, until she bumps right into a waiting Rebekah just outside the door.

She's filing her nails with a look of practiced boredom on her face. "That would have taken you eight minutes to get back to the lab, I checked. You're slipping, Forbes."

Caroline narrows her eyes. Suddenly Rebekah's blazer is pinched between her fingernails and she's yanked forward with an indignant _What the hell!_.

"Are you sniffing me?" Rebekah demands suspiciously.

Rebekah wears Clinique like a fiend. Once when they were still so new to this and were just learning about aromachemical formulas, they'd hoarded just about every copy of _Seventeen_ and _TeenVogue_ in every language they could understand and learned up on the art of skin scents, and while Professor Saltzman did a great job teaching them, he never really got down to the basics of it: scents were meant to beguile, to enamour, not just numbers running infinite down a piece of paper.

Thirteen-year-old Rebekah, who quite liked the idea of nostalgic scents after all those perfume reviews, had decided early on her coup de grâce. She would smell like the 90's, like the neighbor you had growing up, your cousins coming over for sleepovers, your mother leaning down to give you a hug, a waft of nostalgia so clean it's blinding: but Caroline, Caroline knows what she's looking for, and she finds it underneath all that sweet, creamy citrus—Vanilla and gunpowder. Caroline bares her teeth, pushes her back. "Snooping around in my room again?"

"If you want weight sensors put into your floorboards I can give you the number of my guy in Boston." Rebekah straightens her blazer and lifts her chin. The hallway is lightened by a single circular window at the end: the light streaming in brings out the faint freckles on her nose like constellations, and she smiles. Ruthless killers, they smile with blood dripping in the cracks of their teeth, but Rebekah is not just a ruthless killer. She is all that and more. She's a teenaged girl, and that, perhaps, is the most terrifying of them all. Especially when she says—

"And I believe the apt term for it is _spying_."

—

And in the end, all Rebekah wanted was a way in.

She trails Caroline down the stairs (no shortcuts this time) yammering a mile a minute on what a valuable asset she'd be, and while she's great with lasers and has the steadiest hand Caroline has ever seen nock an arrow and aim, she _seriously_ needs to work on her subtlety.

"Just—oh my God, fine!" Caroline hisses from across the room after the sixteenth note Rebekah had flicked at her face. She's totally in tune with her zen; she would have easily ignored Rebekah just fine, if her notes hadn't been origami'd into Chinese throwing stars. Bitch. "Fine, you can come along. Just _once_."

Near-horrified, Elena widens her eyes at her; Hayley mouths, _Are you shitting me?_

Her shoulders lift in an apologetic shrug, not like she can do anything about it. "What the Duchess wants, the Duchess gets. And the Duchess wants in."

Rebekah looks mollified for a second before it melts into a smirk that she aims at Elena's direction. Caroline finds herself wishing she would miss. Just once.

—

"I know it's a little too obvious, but it's the red one," says Elena's voice in her ear.

"Ominous," Caroline murmurs. She snips the red wire as instructed and knots it around the green one. Suspended forty feet in the air with nothing holding her up but Hayley's creaky rappel cord and a whole lot of faith, she asks, "Got it?"

"Hold on, I just need to tap into th… Yep. We have access. Anyone heard from Night Owl?"

The camera was a little too micro for her taste, but she won't let Bonnie catch her saying that. Which isn't really a problem, since Bonnie isn't even _here _right now. If Bonnie _were_ here, she'd have come up with some catty comeback to put Rebekah to heel back in chem lab, maybe even fashioned darts out of her 2B pencils (Atticus can go on for days about molecular regeneration but he isn't exactly the sharpest). And she doesn't want to sound totally petty or whatever, but it's her _birthday_. Bonnie never misses birthdays. The only time she'd come close to missing it was when she ate bad sushi and had to stay in bed for two days, but even then she'd had tiny parachutes dropping down all over the school, somehow knowing where Caroline would be at all times.

She says she has a system, a meticulous one. Caroline thinks something along the lines of magic. She cranes her neck and looks down: it is _just_ like Bonnie to be waiting for an entrance, probably looking up at her hanging by the secret cameras hidden in the chandeliers, a question forming in her lips.

But she's not there.

"Nope. You saw her last, didn't you?" Hayley says through the comms. She sounds bored: Caroline's trying to figure out if she's totally over the conversation or if it's just one of the three expressions she fixes onto her face on a daily basis. If anyone would make it to the end of Saltzman's Interrogation Tactics class, it's Hayley. Caroline had gotten a less than stellar mark—the metal pincers were _cold_ and she has a thing about her feet being ticklish, alright?

"…and she wasn't there when I woke up," Elena's saying. "Girl disappears like nobody's business."

"Almost like—"

There's the sound of gloves shredding against rope and suddenly Bonnie's beside her, legs dangling. "Are you three accusing me of witchcraft again?"

"Jesus!" Caroline exclaims, almost unclipping her own rappel-a-cord from her belt. "Seriously, Bon? You scared the hell out of me."

"Camera was a little fuzzy. If I just…" Bonnie reaches for the panel and with nimble fingers dismantles the micro camera.

"Stop fiddling," Caroline snaps. "It was just fi—"

"Better now. I can actually see people emoting." Elena's voice crackles at the end and Bonnie shoots Caroline a look, _did you mess with my levels again?_ Before she can bring that up, Elena asks, "Aren't you supposed to be in study hall?"

"We're all down with bad sushi," Bonnie says, yanking on her pulley and hoisting herself up. "I'd avoid the third landing if I were you – I was with Sommers all morning."

Caroline groans. "Why?"

"Why do you think?"

"Is this about the time you threw does pencil darts at Rebekah?" Hayley chortles. "'Cause that was great."

"Trust me, _that_ would have been far more pleasant than the morning I had." Bonnie grunts a little as she pulls herself into the ceiling. "I thought we rewired the foyer cameras last week, by the way?"

"Yeah, but Rebekah's coming along. Just for tonight," Caroline stresses when Bonnie shoots her yet another _look _before extending a hand, "and I don't want her finding out all our trade secrets, so… new route it is."

"_Fan_-tastic. All clear, Hayley?"

They hear nothing but crackling static.

Caroline presses her comms unit closer to her ear. "Sting, I can't reach the Wolf."

Nothing but static there too. Caroline turns slowly to Bonnie. "The Wolf was doing surveillance on the third floor landing." You know, before her line went dead. Jenna's office led directly to the landing, and Bonnie didn't even ask to figure that Elena had been in the west wing, making sure no one came through.

"And I'm guessing Sting was in the west wing?"

Caroline nods, and sighs. "Guess we owe Sommers a visit."

—

"I was wondering when you'd show up."

Jenna Sommers had greeted them with a warm smile, her door opening even as Caroline's hand hovered to knock. Hayley was gesturing something at her from behind Sommers' back, but what a time to forget that she hadn't mastered sign language yet. Great.

"I'll spare the lecture," Jenna says as she sits back behind her desk. "I'm sure Bonnie's filled you in over study hall."

Jenna smiles at them.

A second goes by before Caroline remembers to smile back, but the moment she does Jenna's dropped all pretense: she pulls a sheaf of paper out of one of the files behind her and slaps it down on the table.

"Mind explaining this, girls? Vicki Donovan's reported the four of you sneaking into your room late at night with leaves in your hair. A few nights ago someone tripped the wiring and caused a blackout on all the floors your rooms are conveniently located. Traces of gunpowder on the homework you sent in to Professor Shane. And Anna Johnson claims she saw Hayley running off with her hair conditioner."

Caroline skims through the report, Hayley's head knocking into hers, Elena leaning heavily against her, Bonnie's perfume wafting around them as she reads over them. "Seriously? A thief is calling _us _a thief?"

"Where were you last night?" Jenna fires; Caroline shoots back, "Study group."

"None of you were in your rooms."

"We were st—"

"Nor the library, DJ reported."

"—studying in the kitchen. Where the ice-cream is."

"What were you studying?"

"Organic chem," the four of them chorus.

"Which chapter?" Jenna barks. "Wait, nevermind, I'll find it for you."

She slides one of the books from Elena's stack and flips it open right to the pages that they'd taped the blueprints of tonight's endeavour in, along with quick-exit strategies, details of their covers should they be grifting, and patrol rotations.

"Covert Operations homework?" Caroline tries.

Jenna's not buying it. "You girls have been sneaking out all year long, going behind my back, behind your _sisters'_ backs—"

"So we track down stolen goods and return them to their rightful owners." Hayley crosses her arms. "I don't see the harm."

"Not so basic when you're stealing from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. And lately you've been tracking the Augustine Vampire. Do you know why they call him—"

"He sucks you dry. We heard," Bonnie cuts in.

Hayley coughs into her fist, "In more ways than one."

Beside her, Elena colours considerably, and this unfortunately does not go unnoticed by her aunt.

"Did you really think I wouldn't find out? You covered your tracks, but not well enough." Jenna raises an eyebrow. "You girls do realize you're not allowed on solo missions? You don't have that kind of clearance yet."

"Yes, but we took him out all on our—"

"_You don't have that kind of clearance yet_." Jenna doesn't even have to slam her hand down onto the table like her sister would have – a quirk of her brow, a curl of her lip, and Hayley shuts up, but Caroline doesn't give in too easily.

"Look, Jen—Miss Sommers, I know you roll your eyes when we call it spy school, but you can't call this an academy for Exceptional Young Women and then teach us how to speak ten different languages, or how to kill a man with a bobby pin, and expect us to just be—just be…"

Jenna smiles wryly. "Unexceptional?"

"Yes!" Caroline refrains from throwing her hands up. "That's exactly my point. You say we need Level Three clearance to even look at the reports, but you've been telling us stories our whole life, and—"

"It is not the same, Caroline. Trading stories over deep-dish pizza and actually going out there is not on the same equivalent scale. What if you weren't just dealing with a common thief? What if you'd been caught, hmm? What then?"

"But we weren't caught," Elena mutters, finally speaking up. She lifts her chin and looks Jenna in the eye. "We're at the top of our classes. We're ready for this! We've been ready for this for three semesters now; I have _no_ idea why you refuse to even let us pass—"

"Impulsiveness. Inability to follow instructions. Sneaking out at night. Overall stubbornness," Jenna lists, and it's like a punch in the gut each time, even though Caroline's long learned how to take a punch without having it hurt. "And I say this not only as Headmistress but also as your aunt, Elena, so you can understand my reluctance to pass you all. You're not ready for the field."

"So I wasn't ready the time I disabled a bomb with my teeth?"

"I was with you every step of the way."

"I was ten then. I'm eighteen now, and I'm not alone. We're good, Jenna. You can't deny that."

"Good isn't great," Jenna counters. "Good isn't safe."

"Should've thought about that before you enrolled me in spy school." Elena pushes her chair back and drops her earpiece onto the table. "So much for legacy, right?"

Elena's almost out the door when Jenna sighs. "Elena – wait."

She waits, but she doesn't turn around.

The air between them seems stifled, and for a moment Jenna, with her hand lingering in the air looked like one of them. Young and green. Fresh out of her uniform, pink lip gloss that tasted like bubblegum coated on her lips, and Caroline remembers: Jenna's still young. She still has the dew upon her cheeks, nothing threatening to steal it away from her. Not when she had to take this position. Not when Elena's parents died two years ago.

Jenna lowers her hand. "It's your birthday, isn't it, Caroline?"

Caroline nods, hardly daring to hope, hardly daring to breathe.

Hayley's hand creeps towards her thigh.

Bonnie's fingers twitch ever so subtly.

Jenna leans back in her chair, watching the four of them closely before rolling her eyes. "I'll allow it just this one. Oh, and girls? Use the front door this time. The stables are still suffering from the last time you drove the van into it."

* * *

**SUMMARY OF SURVEILLANCE**

**OPERATIVES: **Bonnie Bennett, Class 3; Caroline Forbes, Class 3; Elena Gilbert, Class 3; Hayley Marshall, Class 3. (Hereafter referred to as "The Operatives")

Keeping in tradition of Birthday Week, Operative Bonnie B. hacked into AlphaNet database to pull up crimes unsolved '08-PRESENT. Operatives chose the Augustine Vampire case and observed Person of Interest on four routine (if not totally duplicitous) assignments.

The Operatives then began a series of reconnaissance operations during which they observed the following:

The Subject: Damon Salvatore, aka the Augustine Vampire, residence unknown. Subject steals priceless artifacts from various landmarks and "sucks them dry"; auctions them off and proceeds to steal them back before selling them on the black market.

Known contacts: Operative Elena G., aka young American Socialite Britta Britts aka the Honeypot of the operation. Stefan "The Ripper" Salvatore, brother. Serves as zero threat to this mission as his preferred catch is young girls he toys with and then decapitates. A mission for another day, perhaps? (in which Elena G. would like to input, "Hell no".)

Operatives were sloppy in covering their tracks which resulted in severe punishment of cleaning all the dorm bathrooms, as opposed to the usual punishment of cleaning out the stables. The last time Operatives had to clean out the stables, Operatives accidentally discovered that the stables also doubled as an underground storage facility for the academy's helicopters.

* * *

**part two: you can rearrange me now**

**—**

There's a ratting and a tapping, then an all-out banging, and if that doesn't say _My ass is stuck between two sheets of metal_, she doesn't know what does.

"It appears you've got me stuck in the laundry chute," they hear him say, voice tinny. Caroline notes the non-geographical accent. Probably put on. "I would really appreciate it if you let me out."

"Apparently we're not the only ones after the Caravaggio tonight," Bonnie says, her voice crisp and clear through their comms unit. She'd made a big show of fixing their comms – _I was gone _one_ morning, Caroline – _and the pure satisfaction of rewiring all of Caroline's meddlings, Bonnie gets off on that. "I don't have much on him. All I know is that they call him "The Tank", not exactly sure—"

"Let me out or I will _tank_ all of you!"

"…why," Bonnie finishes, and Hayley exchanges a look with Caroline, because – seriously?

"That's terrible," Caroline remarks.

"Can you shut him up?" Elena snaps quietly. "He's giving me a migraine even through the comms."

She opens the chute just a crack and drops a metal ball in there and slams it shut, knowing once it hits the walls it would inject six milligrams of sodium thiopental into the air around him. "That should shut him up for a few hours."

Indeed, they hear him struggling, slamming his fists against the walls of the metal door four floors down that Elena's jammed when they'd made their way in, and then—total and utter silence.

Thank God.

Rebekah comes in then, hair swept over one shoulder and eyes lined a smoky grey. "Surveilled the room – stuffy old people making boring conversation about their boring lives. Sub-par drinks, but if you slip the guy a twenty behind the bar he'll shake a mean martini. Some French woman's conducting the auction, Mathilde Something; I can't make out her last name."

Hayley plucks the piece of paper from her hand and snorts. "That's a pretentious-ass name."

"Well, this is a pretentious-ass party," Caroline shoots, already stripping herself of her utility belt and boots. "Rotate."

Rebekah's changing out of her dress back into her regulation black turtleneck, trading her elaborate statement necklace with a camera hidden in the heart of the sparkling stone for her slingshot arrow shooter that Hayley's pulled out of one of the laundry bags. "Oh, and Mister Augustine Vampire himself is there as well. He's been bragging – very loudly – about bagging the Caravaggio."

Caroline knows. She heard.

"On it," is Elena's long-suffering sigh.

"You do that," Rebekah sings this with all the smugness in the world, always eager to point out the fact that Caroline isn't the only one topping the Sommers Surveillance Drills. And while Caroline would totally suggest that they take it outside, Rebekah's got a point – with her there they covered more ground and even had a reserve to spare. It's not just that the stakes were higher, too. Somehow all of this felt like some sort of test of Jenna's. So she'll tolerate Rebekah. Just for tonight, she reminds herself, buckling her diamanté heels and stroking the elaborate 'do Elena had braided in two minutes flat in the back of the moving van. If they happen to fail tonight, at least Elena has a bright future in hairdressing.

Speaking of the van—

"Hayley." She quirks her jaw.

"Oh, come _on_. What about Bonnie?"

"Bonnie crashed the van into the stables last time, remember?"

"_Hey."_

"Sorry, Bon." She is seriously getting _so_ sick of saying just for tonight, so she grits her teeth instead. "We have Rebekah securing the floors, Elena and I rotating the room, Bonnie manning the cameras. You're the best driver we have, Marshall."

"Isn't so ironic that my codename is the Wolf, then," Hayley shrugs, eyes sparking in resentment. "_Caged_."

"Spare us the drama," Caroline says. She looks up from the zipper of her dress, apologetic. Please.

Through their earpieces they hear the Augustine Vampire saying, "Britta! Now why am I not surprised to see you here?"

They hear an intake of breath; Caroline just _knows_ Elena has her finger trailing his jaw. "I appreciate the finer things in life. One of them being your company."

Rumbled laughter. Drinks being ordered. Elena's sultry giggle. "So when does the auction start?"

"In thirty minutes or so. Plenty of time for us to… get acquainted. Have a drink with me, Miss Britt, and last night will be just a bad memory."

Thirty minutes. Rebekah passes Caroline her perfume bottle and she spritzes some onto her wrists. "We ready?"

Rebekah taps the toe of her boot against the dryer, where they'd stashed the backup stun guns. "Oh, darling."

"Things could be worse, I guess," Hayley concedes. "I could be Elena right now."

And then she jumps out the window.

—

"I have eyeball," Caroline murmurs into her martini; takes a sip and grimaces. Rebekah had been right about the drinks. She sucks on the olive instead and watches as Salvatore and Elena take a turn around the room in a walk that might as well have been a waltz. If Salvatore wasn't so smarmy she would've thought he was hot, but then he – _get this_ – winks at his reflection in the mirror behind Elena, and she scoffs quietly.

"Sting looks good," Bonnie says, probably smiling down at the many cameras they'd fixed around the room, most of them fixed on Elena and the way the Augustine Vampire had his hand low on her back. "Oh, Miss America? Fix your hair a little; it's kind of obscuring the camera."

"Have I mentioned how much I hate that codename?" Nevertheless, Caroline sweeps her hair behind her ear and her earring – in which the camera was embedded – dangles. It doesn't even matter that she's wearing her prom dress in a room where people were wearing Oscar de la Renta; nobody spares her a second glance as she flits around the room counting the Degas, the number of successful bidders, taking account of security, forming exit strategies, the man playing chess on his phone under the table, four moves away from checkmate. Her memory is her first and best weapon, and she's trained herself on how to wield it the way some would wield knives.

"Buzz cut security guard by the harpist keeps glancing at the door east of where you're standing, Sting."

"Oh, really?" Elena laughs at something Salvatore says.

"Every five… Yeah, there it is."

"You've painted me a _priceless_ picture of your childhood, Damon – I think I can see it, yes." Elena catches her eye for a split second before leaning in to listen to something Salvatore is whispering into her ear, and of course Caroline gets the full blast of it.

"Eurgh," Caroling grimaces.

"I think I'm gonna barf," Hayley groans.

Somewhere in the van, Caroline imagines Bonnie looking up from looping all the security cameras. "Is this guy for real?"

Rebekah just scoffs. "Americans."

Elena keeps smiling.

—

It's not like she's never done this before. When she was fourteen one of Saltzman's drills had been shoving her into a crack den with nothing but a pocketknife. The muscles had been fake but the pain, the blood: that had been real. So she's sitting at a bar drinking a bad martini and watching Smarmy McSmarmFace make off with her best friend – it's a pretty sweet deal, if you ask her.

They'd mapped this out, blueprints hidden inside notebooks, maps etched into the back of their hands in the middle of class. Whispered conversations with the shower running. Practice runs using Saltzman's simulators, the encrypted password changed back come morning.

But nothing could have prepared her for—

"An ex of yours?"

Caroline turns to see someone with blue eyes and hands that look big and warm, holding out a drink to her, and thinks: _Excuse you_.

She says, "Excuse me?"

"You've been staring, and…" His eyes sweep over her rose-blushed cheekbones, the curl of her hair, "none too discreetly, I'm afraid."

As discreet as you're being now? she wants to scoff, but all she does is give a demure little laugh a la Gilbert, and eyes the drink. "I just finished one."

He smiles. He has the sort of face you could maybe look twice at in a crowded subway, but his dimples, they saved him from obscurity. She keeps her hand at her side. They already have one distraction set up for tonight, and he is not it.

"I understand the hesitance – the drinks here are bloody awful. Sad, really, if you consider how lavish these events are." He leans back against the bar, sliding the drink closer. "But I've found that if you slip—"

"Slip the bartender a twenty he can shake a mean martini," Caroline finishes while inspecting her manicure like she's bored, like this is boring. Get the hint, she wills silently.

In the corner of her eye, Salvatore's leading Elena out of the hall, and what a _time_ for someone to decide to walk up to her. Hadn't she worn the most nondescript dress in history? (Alright, so it's not as nondescript as she would've liked. It was her _Prom _dress. Caroline Forbes didn't do nondescript. Caroline Forbes did _Princess Grace of_ _Monaco_ hot. But as it were with most things, nondescript was also relative – if you compared it to the other women swanning about the room.)

When she looks up from her nails – perfect French tips, thank you very much – he's still looking at her. Sizing her up. And as much as she'd wanted to follow Rule #2 of the Covert Operations handbook (_Be inconspicuous_) she's much more of a champion at the first rule—don't hesitate.

She could take him. He's not that much taller than her: 5'11", a hundred and eighty pounds, give or take. American, right-handed, probably in the publishing business, from the way his silver of his wristwatch is slightly shinier on the other side, polished by sliding his wrist across paper on a daily basis. That, and he had that paper-and-ink scent about him underneath the expensive cologne.

Gotcha. Eyes on his, she lifts her glass and drinks deep. "What's caught your eye tonight?"

"Art's a subjective business," he says a little ruefully, "but if I were to be so lucky, I'd bid on a Ree Morton. Her work is filled with whimsy, wit. Relevance."

_Contemporary_. The word registers in her mind like a chiming bell, even as her mind prattles on, _measures quality in rubrics, demonstrative skill, determined to evoke response_, and – okay, her brain needs to shut up right now. She looks around, mostly for Elena, but mostly because— "I see no Ree Hortons here."

"You wouldn't find any." And, okay – did this dude just sidle to her? "But you _can_ find them on display this week at the Whitney, and I have a town car waiting outside."

"_Did this guy just—"_

"Way to go, Miss America."

"This is so much fun," Elena grins, but Caroline knows who the smile's for – and it's definitely not for the Augustine Vampire.

"All this fuss about - what, Miss America getting picked up?" Rebekah snorts. There's the faint sound of her boots scuffing against metal, her voice echoing. "Do you lot not see many boys, then?"

"We go to an all-girls' school, Duchess."

"I know, Wolf girl. I grew up with brothers. They're just a bunch of cavemen—"

"If any of them share your genetic disposition, I'll take your word for it."

"I'll have you know—"

The bickering goes on, and Caroline would very much like to reach into her ear and rip out her earpiece, because _Hello_, they came here with one singular motive, and the screeching in her head wasn't helping one bit. Nor is the way this guy is looking at her.

Growing up in the academy, they've learned to catalogue and compartmentalize. Their enemies became nothing more than marks with notches on their belts, eyes comprising of details pocketed away. They were nothing more than a caricature on a piece of paper waiting to be erased, and getting over the heartbreak of Matthew Donovan was much easier after she'd mastered it.

Conversation is easier too, she finds. You know, once you figure out the right moment to wrap your thighs around his neck and apply enough pressure to _snap_. Knowing you can walk away from something unscathed.

He's a caricature, she reminds herself.

She rolls her eyes instead. "Nice try. If you're so into contemporary art, then why…?"

"Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm quite fond of Baroque…"

"Quite fond of Baroque? Sounds like something my pretentious brother would say."

"Shut up, Duchess."

"…great drama, rich, deep colours, intense sensation – his figures weep and shout; _such_ an observation of the human state."

With her friends screaming in her ear, she can only offer a blank, "You know a lot about this." For someone in publication, she doesn't add.

"It's one of my passions." He lets his gaze linger. "I have an appreciation for genuine beauty."

"Who _is_ this smarm?" Rebekah wants to know. "Snooze."

Bonnie giggles from her end. "I'll find out."

And Caroline wants to say _no_, there will be no reconnaissance work done on this guy, he's not her date, they were here on a Very Important Mission, and she doesn't think he'd appreciate having some file in Langeley with his name on it. Whatever his name is.

"Do you go to these things often?" he asks. "I don't think I've ever seen you before."

That's the point, but she doesn't tell him that.

"Very easy on the eyes," Elena comments, while looking at some twentieth-century Marsden Hartley canvas. "These matching paintings look good together. So is it true that this canvas goes _on top_? I'd love to see that."

"You did not," Bonnie gasps. Hayley makes a sound like she's impressed.

"That's enough," she snips in Elena's direction before she can stop herself.

He looks confused for a second, but before he can say anything, she says, "Excuse me, but I have to go."

She leaves the drink untouched.

—

She's pretending to be admiring the Degas, but really she's examining the back of Elena's head in the reflection of the protective glass,

Rebekah says something then, but it comes in stutters and stops, a crackle. "—bloody hell – _wrong _with this – hear me?"

She can _so _hear the elephant in the room trumpeting, _This is why you shouldn't mess with my levels!_, but everyone's much too tense to say it out loud.

"Miss America," Bonnie says, and there's such urgency in her voice that Caroline decides she'll late the name thing go. Bonnie says over the clack of her nails against keyboards, "Duchess isn't blinking anymore. She was on the sixteenth floor, going down the vent that runs right down into the room they're keeping the Caravaggio. Security's tighter, I think some kind of jammer…"

"That's the only way in," Caroline murmurs. "There are four guards here, one in every corner, and they're all guarding that door pretty tight. And there'll be more security in the room, too."

"You know," Hayley pipes up, "if you hadn't confined me to driver duty—"

"You're the reserve. Patience." Because she sure as hell is losing hers. She smells the familiar cologne again and groans quietly, her eyes closing.

And there he is, Mister Quite-fond-of-Baroque himself, holding out another drink. "I made an educated guess and figured martinis weren't your thing. So—"

She looks down at the drink, wondering what he'd meant by 'not your thing'. Martinis are classic, she'd learned in Madame Davina's classes, urban sophistication, but like, straight-up alcohol. Does that mean he'd thought her an alcoholic? Does she look like an alcoholic?

She pauses. Does she look old enough to even be an alcoholic? That was a nice thought.

But then again, she's probably thinking too much into it.

"Vodka soda with a twist," he says as she takes it.

"Can't take a hint, can you?"

"Entirely immune to them," he says affably. "And you're standing here alone, a beautiful woman in the middle of a crowded room—"

"Look," she sighs, "I'm not kidding when I say I've heard every pick-up line in the book, so you can save it, alright?"

(It's true, she has. There's two whole chapters dedicated to it in Culture and Assimilation—Seduction: The Manipulation and Simulating Of.)

His lip curls upwards. "Actually, I was going to ask you what you thought of the people here."

_Will you leave me alone then?_ she wants to ask, but that would be rude – and the point of this was to draw as much attention away from herself as possible. "A bunch of art frauds."

Which is kind of totally true.

"And that would be?"

She grits her teeth. Can this guy _not_ see she's trying to circumvent a meltdown?

"Dick-waving masters of the universe types," she snaps, _ya happy?_ She looks back at the Degas and realizes with a jolt that Elena's not behind her anymore. She waves her hand in some general direction as she continues talking—_where are you, where are you_— "Hedge fund art collectors who only buy what other dick-waving, masters of the universe collectors buy. What the market creates, the market destroys. It's a vicious cycle. Now, if you'll excuse me—"

He catches her arm. "Is that what you think of me, then?"

"I don't even know you," she says as politely as she can muster. "Please let me go, you're hurting me." He totally wasn't. The thought of him hurting her seemed laughable at best.

"Lose the hottie, Miss America," Bonnie commands. "Go see what's taking the Duchess so long – she should have reached the room exactly two minutes ago. Our window of opportunity is closing. I'm bringing the Wolf in."

"_Yes_," Hayley. "Move over, Bonnie, I need to see the camer—Subject is no longer within visual contact. Where are you, Sting?"

"If I may be so bold, you smell exquisite." Oh my god, when had he gotten so close? "I wonder where I've smelled that before?"

"Ooh, Penthouse Three is as amazing as it looks in the brochures!" Elena chirps, and Caroline's heart sinks. _How_ could she have let them out of her sight like that? Stupid, stupid—

"Miss _America!_"

"It's Clinique," she snips. She turns to him, her heart a tattoo on her chest how much she wants to _slug_ him across the face. She settles for pouring her drink down his pants. "And a little too bold, I think."

She gathers up her dress and gets the hell out of there, walking in a fast pace until she reaches a corner, where she promptly flies to the end of the hall and takes the emergency stairs two steps at a time.

She hears a dinging in the background, probably something Bonnie had looked up. She hopes it's not about—

"Miss America, I ran his face through the database, and—"

"_No_, Night Owl," she snaps, taking a moment to adjust the straps of her heels. "No recon, no surveillance. He's just a guy who approached me at a bar, I don't want to know _anything_—"

"Even if you wanted to, you won't be able to," Bonnie says in a rush, "because there's nothing on him, Care. Nothing. It's like he doesn't exist. The only thing I found was a grainy black and white shot from eight years ago, codename: The Hybrid. That's it."

Caroline stops in her tracks. "What?"

"Did you drink anything he gave you?" Hayley demands.

"No," Caroline says, but it sounds faraway even in her own ears, and even Bonnie's clicking keyboards and Hayley's loud ranting and Elena's quiet breathing fades into the background, because—

"I think I'm being followed."

"Try breadcrumbing?" Hayley suggests, and for the first time, Caroline hears a tremor of fear in her voice. "Flip. Or corner-clearing."

_I'm in a stairwell_, she thinks desperately, and then she feels it: a shadow creeping up behind her, the faint rustle of wind against fabric – but as soon as she turns around she knows it's too late.

"Hello, sweetheart." He says, gives his rifle a nifty little flip, and strikes her head with the butt of it.

"You're British," she says dazedly.

"And you're unconscious," he says as he catches her, and that's the last she remembers.

* * *

**part three: cast me in to wage a war**

**—**

"Polyester," is the first thing she moans when she comes to.

The second is: _Please, make it stop,_ when she realizes he's been waiting for her to wake up, his accent (his real one) grating in her ears, so he can do that whole For the Greater Good monologue crap people like him seem to love.

People like him.

Compartmentalized, asshole.

There was only once that she'd encountered such 'people like him', and that was in Saltzman's simulators. The level she hasn't managed to pass just yet. Rebekah had come close last time, but she'd ran out of arrows before she could bury it in the simulator's head.

Caroline gulps. She so totally failed Jenna's test, didn't she.

Not only that, but she's probably going to die.

Ah, crap. She'll probably never see Class 4.

She'll probably never even see daylight again, from how tight this polyester _thing_ was blindfolding her. The room they're in must be one of the standard ones – she knows because she feels the difference in the carpeting, the fact that the chair she's tied to is made of synthetic wood and not from an actual chunk of tree. They have the brochures tacked inside Elena's organic chem textbook. She knows there's a window right across the bed, she feels a strange sort of coldness on her back; he must have her placed in front of the bathroom. Door open, lights switched on. That must mean she's about twenty, twenty five feet away from the window. Still a long shot, but one can hope.

What a way to go, she sighs. On her birthday, too.

Of course, that had been two minutes ago, and now she thinks she stands a pretty good chance, especially considering the fact that she'd pierced a sizeable gash in his stomach with her heels, the blade that shot out when she presses the buckle.

"You're pretty good," he grunts, ducking a blow. "Where did they train you, Camp Swampy?"

"CIA?" she snorts. "Hardly." She heaves a punch that Elena's once codenamed Vicious but he throws up a hand and catches it in his palm, twisting them around so she's on the floor, his knee pinning her there, her arm twisted painfully behind her.

She winces as he presses down, her spine creaking under the pressure.

"That was fast," he remarks like they're both still in the ballroom making pretentious small talk, but because he's the kind of person who likes to give in to his impulse (educated guess) and a little bit of a douche (fact), he leans down, presses his nose to the back of her neck and breathes in, long and deep.

It's all instinct and adrenaline from there, her rolling them over and bringing home a fist across his jaw, him throwing her off and her stumbling for only a breadth of a second before she catches his arm with the squeeze of her thighs, flips herself so he falls to the floor with a heavy thud, doesn't stop squeezing until she hears a resounding _crack_.

He's jolting underneath her, so she jabs the gash in his stomach with her knee until he lets out a cry, doesn't stop until his face turns white. She deals blow after blow, something delirious in her punches, doesn't stop until she's sure he's out cold.

"So was that," she pants.

—

First order of business: tie the fucker up.

She drags his body into the closet and dumps the bedding on him. Her dress is pretty much ruined, she thinks with a tune of sadness, so she balls that up and throws it in after him, before locking the door and jamming the door handle.

There's a black bag under the bed, most likely kicked there in their struggle, and she rifles through and finds a spare shirt. It'll have to do. It sags at the shoulders on her but at least it covers her underwear. She finds her comms unit and her pushdagger on the dresser. She slides the comms unit into her ear and the pushdagger into her thigh holster.

"Night Owl?" she tries. Nothing but radio silence.

Well then.

She goes back to the bag, finds some sketchbooks. She she'd been wrong about him being in publishing, she realizes. He sketches. She flips through it listlessly, the novelty of art drained out of her the minute he'd dropped the bomb of his real accent, but pauses when she sees a page that isn't like the others.

A map, she thinks, but she looks closer and sees that it's blueprints. She snaps the sketchbook shut, feels around in the bag and pulls out long, cylindrical leather case. A bead of sweat trickles down her neck, her legs refusing to sit in this position for so long, just ready to spring, to _run_, but she forces herself to stay and unzips the case, and gasps.

Her girls. She has to find her girls.

In what probably looks like the most horrific walk of shame ever, she clatters out of the room in her too-high heels and heads for the stairs. Penthouse Three, Elena had said earlier. She hopes nothing drastic had happened while she'd been out, because the night had certainly taken a turn for one.

A bellboy is dragging his cart down the hall so she presses her back flat against the wall, frowning up at the golden chandeliers streaming warm light, chasing shadows away. The elevator dings, the cart rolls in, the doors shut—she rolls out of her hiding place and all but kicks down the door to Penthouse Three, wincing, because yeah, these stilettos were pretty much indestructible, heels were still heels, and kicking down a door with one? Ouch.

"Elena!" she cries, hobbling in. "Are you alright?"

She turns just in time to see Elena cracking the Augustine Vampire in the back of his head with a champagne bottle.

"Shhh," Elena croons soothingly as he goes limp. "This is just a bad memory." Then she turns to Caroline, gives her a once over. "What happened to you?"

—

"What do you mean you don't know?" Caroline demands in a whisper as they make their way back to the laundry room.

"I mean I don't _know_," Elena says, biting her lower lip. "My comms went dead, all signals blocked from the sixteenth floor up—what?"

Caroline's held her hand out to stop Elena before she can push the door open. "There's somebody in there."

They exchange glances. Elena holds up a finger, two fingers, three—

They kick the door open, both yelling. "Hands in the air!"

"Aughh!" Bonnie screams, dropping her stun gun.

"Aughh!" Caroline screams back, brandishing the leather case, before coming to her senses. "What the hell, Bon?" she hisses. "What are you doing here? You're supposed to be—"

"In the van, yeah, but everyone's line went dead. What was I supposed to do, just wait there?" she's breathing harshly, probably terrified out of her wits – she's the hacker, not the muscle; she rarely if ever travels so far out of the back of the van. "Oh, and The Tank's awake."

"I can see that," Caroline says, wrinkling her nose as the banging stars up again. "Time."

"Twenty hundred hours, on the dot," Elena reports. She holds up another sodium thiopenthal ball. "Shall I?"

Bonnie looks up from her packing. "Ooh, can I do it?"

Caroling reaches for her discarded sweater, gladly divesting herself of the Hybrid's shirt. She throws it down the chute after the sodium thiopental. "Did you dig anything up on the Hybrid?"

"Nothing," Bonnie admits with a trace of shame. Caroline gets it. They've never been one-upped like this before. Somewhere in the back of her head she thinks they might have bitten off more than they can chew with the Augustine Vampire, but how the hell was she supposed to know that the dude had a lot of people coming after his shit?

"I found this," she says after clipping on her utility belt. The leather case. She tosses it to Bonnie, who unzips it, and her eyes go round.

Whether it was an exact reproduction or not, Caroline's not sure – she is so _done_ with this shit – but either way, it's the painting they were going to steal back tonight. _The Lute Player_, stolen from some Californian quote unquote philanthropist who'd probably stolen it from someone else, but – psh, details. Besides, Netherlands was pretty chill about stolen art, and as far as the dude was concerned it was as good as his, if the last twenty-three years of having it in his possession meant anything at all.

"Is it real?" Elena asks in a hushed voice.

"No," Bonnie says decidedly. "I mean, it's perfect, but its' not the real deal. This was just a distraction. By the time the buyer finds out they'll probably have sold it on the black market."

Distraction. Caroline feels a bit like a novice all of a sudden. _Their_ distraction had been to set up bombs, just tiny ones, on the other side of the city, thereby distracting the police. And this Hybrid guy's was something as simple as a replica.

Oh well. Not like they needed the explosions anymore.

"So if the Tank's after the Caravaggio—"

"And so is the Hybrid—"

Bonnie rolls the replica up and slides it back in the case. "What do you think? Working together?"

"Definitely. And they might not be alone. Remember what Saltzman said? It's best to work in threes." Caroline looked at her friends and they looked back, and hysterical laughter bubbled up their throats.

"We're well-compensated for, then," Elena giggles, wiping her eyes.

"Not if we can't find Hayley and Rebekah," Caroline says darkly, and that shuts them up.

—

It takes Bonnie about four minutes to fix their comms devices, and Caroline's never felt so much relief to hear Rebekah's voice fill her ear—

"What the bloody hell have you girls been doing? Mingling with the socialites?"

—as annoying as it might be.

"Fighting off hitmen, so it would seem," Caroline snaps back. "What are _you_ doing, still stuck in a ventilation shaft?"

"I got out, I'll have you know," Rebekah replies snootily. "An hour ago. And guess what? They brought the painting out to be auctioned off. It's gone, Miss America."

Caroline feels the blood drain out of her face. "Gone?" she whispers. "What do you mean gone?"

"_Gone_. Disappeared. Vanished. Poof."

"And you didn't _stop_ them?"

Rebekah's voice cracks like lightning. "And what was I meant to do, run into the room screaming bloody murder? There's only one of me!"

"No way." Caroline slumps back against the wall. "No. It couldn't be gone." She looks down at the replica in her hands. Their reserve must have picked it up, then, upped and fled when they realized the Hybrid wasn't coming. "They have the Caravaggio. No way," she says again.

"Yes way," Rebekah says, but there's regret in her voice. Somewhere. "Mission failed?"

No. She refuses to believe it.

"Girls." Caroline sits up. "Anyone heard from the Wolf?"

—

Back home, and by home she meant Westchester, and by Westchester she meant the academy, Hayley could disappear for hours on end and no one would bat an eyelid. It's not the same as Bonnie disappearing. No, Bonnie would disappear behind a book one moment, and when you turn around she wouldn't be there. Probably run off to test out a new gadget she'd read about in _Gadget Today_, or to decode an encrypted message from her parents. She knew the cipher by heart, and it's not like the rest of them could actually decipher the message on the spot, but the girl still liked her privacy.

But Hayley, whenever she disappears, Caroline would usually find her in the gym, unloading the day's events into a punching bag.

She had good form but too much anger, always fighting like she's being backed into a corner, thrashing out with everything she has in her. Caroline steps up onto the mat behind her and reaches a coaxing hand out, and suddenly Hayley has her hauled into the air in one fell swoop.

She catches herself before she's face-planted into the mat, but just barely.

"Sorry," Hayley says tersely, wiping sweat from her brow. She doesn't sound very sorry. In fact, she sounds nearly hostile, and Caroline knows not to prod. Not after how many years of rooming together.

The gym is empty but for the two of them, the sound of Hayley's fists pounding into the air drummed out like morse code. Caroline wonders what Bonnie would make of it. She just sprawls back, watching Hayley beat the crap out of the bag like it'd done her some personal wrong. Waits.

Ten minutes in—

"Anna Johnson got into Class 3."

"Hm," Caroline says.

"You're in Class 3."

"So I am."

"Along with Rebekah." _Punch_. "And Elena." _Kick_. "Even freaking _Bonnie_."

"Well, we don't have many people on the research track," Caroline shrugs. "She's a valuable asset."

Hayley grunts and Caroline groans inwardly – totally the wrong thing to say, wasn't it? Like she hadn't just spent the morning in Culture and Assimilation working on cotillion etiquette, gracious smiles, the art of small talk. Etcetera etcetera.

Zen is something Hayley's never mastered, while Caroline's all in for fakin' it til you're makin' it. Maybe it's time they try a different approach. "Don't jackknife me," she warns, reaching for Hayley again. "But… you need to calm down."

On a different day, Hayley would have just let that pass, but not today. She pushes away from her punching bag and zeroes her fist in on Caroline's face, and – um, rude much? She ducks at the last minute and kicks Hayley's feet out from beneath her, pulling out every defense maneuver Saltzman had ever taught them.

"Come on," Hayley growls, hands balled into angry little fists, shoulders hunched, feet apart. "Fight back. You love this."

"I'm not fighting you," Caroline says calmly. She stands with her back straightened. "Not without grounds. Unless you used up the rest of my cover up, which you _so know_ is only legal in Europe, then yeah – we have a problem."

"Your hair is a problem," Hayley says as snarkily as possible, but Caroline just rolls her eyes.

"We both know you don't give a shit about that. Try harder."

Hayley lunges forward just as Caroline steps aside, anticipating every move. "This is why I'm in Class 3 and you're not, Hayley. You forget to breathe."

She throws herself back onto her hands in a perfect arc, Hayley's combat boot striking the air just a centimeter away from her nose. Hayley breaks her handspring with a shove of her hands though, and they both end up in a heap of styled hair and rumpled tanks on the mat.

"Totally uncalled for," Caroline gripes, wind knocked out of her. "You knew I was dying to try out that move."

Hayley rolls over, pins Caroline down by her shoulders with her hands, fever hot. Always fever hot. "I'm breathing now."

"Good. Keep doing that."

Hayley closes her eyes, tries to get her breathing levelled out. There are flecks of gold in her eyes when the sun hits them, and it does nothing for the anger still awash on her face. "I just don't know why I always seem to get left behind."

Caroline decides then and there on a solution. "What are you doing tonight?"

—

They split up. Bonnie with Rebekah (since Rebekah was the strongest out of all of them, and while Bonnie could take out a man if she wanted to – she's not sure she wants to, shocker – it would help to have Rebekah's skillset with her), Elena with Caroline.

They round a corner and nearly collide with a body being hurled their way. Elena goes down with it, but Caroline's reflexes save her at the last minute.

Hayley's crouched down the hall, looking disheveled and sweaty. "Hey."

"Who was he?" Elena asks, struggling to sit up. She kicks the limp body off of her. "Bad guy?"

"No, he was just annoying. Kept trying to get my number," Hayley says, dusting her hands off. "The Hybrid has the Caravaggio."

"Glad you're all updated," Caroline starts to say, but Hayley interrupted her with, "No, I _saw_ him take it. Tall, about 5'11". Dark hair, brown eyes, definitely the grifter, because when he saw me he didn't even try to fight, he just sent me the most condescending smile and like, _waved_ before scaling out the window."

Caroline scrubs her hand down her face, reaches for her comms. "Night Owl, we found the Wolf."

"_Fan_-tastic. I'm stuck in yet another airduct with the Duchess." Bonnie sounds like she has her face pressed against a wall.

"Oh, be grateful I'm even letting you near me. I know you've been sniffing my hair all year, trying to suss out the conditioner I use—" Rebekah sounds like she's struggling to breathe while upside down.

"_Girls_," Caroline hisses. "Now is _not_ the time."

"So what's the plan?" Elena asks, looking at her. Caroline has her back to them, eyes closed, massaging her temples. If Elena asks, she'll say she's fighting a slight migraine from all the blows she's taken, but really, she's wishing for a birthday miracle.

"Caroline." She feels Hayley's hand on her shoulder, hot as it always is, even with the thick wool in between. "There's a chance they might still be here. They can't leave that many of their men behind. The whole hotel is on lockdown. The lobby's in mayhem, we can't go through there: people running around trying to figure out what happened to a seventy-five million dollar painting."

Caroline opens her eyes, a slow smile growing on her lips. "Perfect."

"Perfect?" Bonnie repeats blankly.

"We have nowhere to go but up."

—

Hayley's guess on the door being locked two flights down is right, but instead of wasting time picking the lock she chooses to kick it open instead—the bursts open and hangs off its hinges and they run across the roof, panting hard.

That's twenty floors in just two minutes and fifteen seconds, she'll have you know.

"Where are you?" From up high, the night air whips her hair about her face.

"Look down," Rebekah says, and Caroline grips takes a peek over the edge to see Rebekah hanging from the side of the building, one hand on the holder she'd suctioned to the glass, the other fastening her rappel securely around her waist. She tugs at her crossbow strapped to her back, the soles of her boots pressed against the glass to steady herself. She lifts the scope to her squinting eye.

Caroline unravels her rappel-a-cord and tries to secure it to the ledge; Hayley swats her hands aside when her hands tremble too much for a proper anchor. "What's taking so long?"

"My finger is _on_ the trigger, Miss America."

"Well, pullit." She sees the back of his shirt—the Hybrid, she thinks, the _Hybrid_—rippling in the wind all those stories below as he bounds across the street, and her voice hitches in desperation. "They're getting away."

"I just need him to look this way—"

Hayley leans over the ledge and yells down, "No, you just need to freaking _aim_—"

"Duchess!"

"Why isn't she shooting?"

"I swear to Go—Duchess, shoot him _now_."

"I know what I'm doing, will the four of you keep your fucking knickers on?"

"The van's pulling up—"

"_Duchess!"_

"I have visual!"

Caroline whips out her comms piece and screams into it: _Fucking shoot him, Mikaelson!_

Rebekah shoots.

Rebekah misses.

Gravity loses all meaning as Caroline promptly kicks herself from the ledge and rappels down forty feet so fast her blood shoots straight to her eyes. "What the hell was that? You go on and on about being finest freaking marksman a girl our age with a golden freaking _plaque_ to prove it, and you—what the hell!"

Rebekah slips a little, her grip on her rappel cord something liquid. She turns to Caroline, eyes wild, and gasps, "That's my brother."

"Holy shit," they hear Bonnie whisper. "So the guy we have trapped in the laundry chute—"

"Must be my other brother, yes. At least now I know why I found them to be so pretentious." Rebekah tries to affect a laugh, but it comes out shaky.

Caroline presses her forehead into the glass.

"We're dead," she realizes.

* * *

**SUMMARY OF SURVEILLANCE**

**OPERATIVES: **Bonnie Bennett, Class 3; Caroline Forbes, Class 3; Elena Gilbert, Class 3; Hayley Marshall, Class 3; Rebekah Mikaelson, Class 3. (Hereafter referred to as "The Operatives")

In order to retrieve the Caravaggio (hereafter referred to as "The C" as Hayley M. has trouble spelling it), Operatives undertook a (totally allowed!) reconnaissance mission that brought them deep into unknown territory, aka the Mandarin Oriental, located 40.7691° N, 73.9830° W.

Operatives could not ascertain as to how they stumbled into "some Oceans 11 type bullshit", as Caroline F. puts it, but it is with duly respect that the Operatives report that they did the best they could under those circumstances, and under those circumstances they observed the following:

The Augustine Vampire does in fact "suck you dry" as is his modus operandi. Operative Elena G. reports that he is very bad at it.

The C could not be acquired on time, resulting in massive disappointment and five sore girls, and a missed curfew.

Operatives did however manage to acquire Kol "The Tank" Mikaelson (residence unknown, MO unknown) who remains bound and gagged as this report is typed out.

* * *

**part four: we live in cities you'll never see on screen**

**—**

"You're not dead," Hayley says.

"It's fine," Hayley says.

"We have leverage," Hayley says.

Hayley says, "Nobody could have anticipated this. We weren't made or anything. In and out clean. The _miniscule_ detail that we _kind of_ kidnapped a government operative is just going to have to blow ov—"

"Not a government operative," Rebekah interrupts. A pause, a sheepish admission. "My family is evil."

Elena, patron saint of disbelief, says, "What do you mean evil?"

"What, like Refuse-to-pay-taxes evil? Assign-their-daughter-to-infiltrate-spy-school evil?" As soon as Bonnie says this everyone's immediately on their feet, not exactly crowding Rebekah, but not giving much space to move should she choose to run either. Caroline _hopes_ she doesn't run. While fighting in stilettos came in handy – what with their sharp points and ability to pierce the most tender of body parts – they also gave her a shitload of blisters, and imagine the mess if they burst untimely.

"No," Rebekah says mournfully. She doesn't even look offended that they're eyeing her like she might be like, a double agent. Or something.

"What, _No, they pay taxes_ or _No, I'm not a double agent_?" Caroline demands.

"I'm not a double agent," Rebekah snaps, scowling. "My family's just evil. They steal for sport, they kill for power. Other than that they're pretty good citizens. No overdue mortgages. Finn goes to church on Sundays. And I'm pretty sure they pay taxes."

"Yeah, who cares that they kill people, right? As long as they vote." Bonnie's still trying to keep composure, which is great considering the situation: Elena's already thrown herself down on Caroline's bed, her teeth worrying away at her bottom lip. "So what do we do with him?"

She's referring to Rebekah's brother, of whom they have tied up in the corner of the room, their wardrobes pushed around him to form a makeshift cage. He stirs every so often, and every so often Hayley hits him in the back of the head with Caroline's discarded stiletto.

"I can't keep doing this, you know," Hayley says as she whacks him for the seventh time. The stars are still out, but it's not going to be night time forever. Morning will come, along with the repercussions of what they just did.

"We just kidnapped a government operative," Elena whispers.

"Again, not a spy," Rebekah reminds them exasperatedly. "He's just evil."

_Evil_, Rebekah says, like they were in some kind of Disney movie. These villains, they maimed and murdered, too, fire and chaos. Only without the spells. Caroline cards her hands through her hair. "Yeah, pretty sure I can account for that."

Hayley reaches a hand out and traces the bruise blooming under her eye. "That looks bad."

Caroline brushes her hand away. "It'll heal. So, okay. We've got a guy chained in a corner of our room. Who's not a spy," she adds, rolling her eyes. Rebekah looks satisfied. "How many demerits is sneaking a boy on campus going to cost us?"

"Forget that. We didn't just kidnap a spy. We kidnapped a straight-up '_He's just evil'_. That's even worse," Elena moans. "We kidnapped an evil guy, more evil guys are going to come to his aid—how many evil brothers do you _have_?"

"Four," Bonnie pipes up, tapping into the school's database. She's pulled up Rebekah's permanent record, and while Rebekah had glared at that, she couldn't exactly do anything about it. "Finn, Elijah, Klaus, Kol. And – woah, Finn's a pirate?"

Rebekah nods and adds as an afterthought, "Oh, but he's not evil."

Three evil brothers and a pirate. Suddenly Caroline's own family history – absentee sheriff mom, dead gay dad, present-but-distant stepfather – doesn't seem so bad. Not all of them came from spy families like Elena, who was probably going to grow up and work for the CIA before retiring and taking up the position of headmistress here, as was her legacy. Not all of them had parents who worked for the MI6 like Bonnie. Hayley grew up in the Bayou, drifting from foster family to foster family until she found her place here. And Hayley, she remembers, Hayley's been here almost as long as Elena has.

"O… kay." Bonnie shuts her laptop with a sort of finality. "That's all there is to it. No record of your family ever running for office or even purchasing a handgun. Your family sure knows how to cover their tracks."

Caroline squints at her. "Is Mikaelson even your last name?"

"Of course," Rebekah sniffs. "And don't be daft, Bonnie – we're Britain's best-kept secret; do you really think it'd be so easy to do recon on us? Now are we done playing twenty questions or are we going to wake my brother up? Can't have you lot making him more unattractive than he already is."

They splash some water onto over his head and Caroline slaps at his face, and after a while Kol comes to with a groan. Rebekah's crouched in front of him, her face tight, and he blinks down blearily at her. "Bekah?"

"How are you feeling?"

"Aside from this massive headache…" He trails off, notes the tense circle of girls around him, the rumpled tie on the dresser table, the class picture Caroline's tacked above her bed. She sees something register in his eyes and – ah, crap. "Am I in your school? Your all-girls school?"

"Look, Kol—"

"_Brilliant_," Kol enthuses. "I'm feeling great! Do you know how many times I've tried to break into this place? Elijah catches me every time, of course—your security's oddly tight for a prep school—"

"Kol, shut up. We're going to ask you a few questions."

Rebekah's brother does a double take. "Why are you wearing all black? Have you joined some sort of cult?"

His eyes fall on the utility belt.

And then:

"Oh shit." Kol throws his head back, and then winces as the ostrich egg-sized lump in his head hits the wall. "Oh _shit_. We sent our baby sister to spy school. Nik's going to love this."

"Wait, you didn't know?" Caroline whirls to Rebekah. "I mean – you didn't tell them?"

"There are some things I'd like to keep to myself," Rebekah says quietly. "My family keeps from me so many things and they take even more, it felt good to have ownership of something. Even if it is something as inane as identity."

"Oh boo fucking hoo, so we didn't tell you of our comings and goings; would you rather us subject you to the sight of us microwaving our enemies to death?"

Bonnie wrinkles her nose. "That's graphic."

"Well, that's what we do," Kol says airily. "And I must say, Beks, you've shamed the family. Imagine having a _spy_—"

"In a family of con artists and thieves? Is there any difference, brother dear? What were you and Nik doing so far from home, then? Taking in the sights? Defending the patriarchy? As if the world needed any more of it from you, you—you sexist asshole!

"Admit it!" she cries, grabbing the stiletto from Hayley and hurling it at his shoulder. "The only reason you never let me in on all the—" she airquotes, "—_family meetings_ is because you think I'm a girl and I can't handle it, well guess what? Elijah ends up enrolling me in the best academy in all of Westchester, in all of this side of the world, in fact, and I was raised a spy right under your noses." Rebekah stands back, chest heaving. "All because you thought I wasn't good enough. It's your fault."

Kol looks away.

—

"There he is," Hayley says and jabs at the screen. "That's the guy."

The screen is frozen with the image of the dark-haired man Hayley had described, in the middle of deftly dismantling the Caravaggio's frame, caught by Bonnie's much-complained-about micro camera.

"That's Elijah," Rebekah says. She looks as dumbfounded as the rest of them, the newfound knowledge of her family's nightly activities.

"Codename unknown," Bonnie says softly in disappointment. "I hacked into the IRS and came up with nothing. If your family paid taxes nobody would know. You guys are paranoid."

"Comes with the territory, I suppose," Elena says, and twists her body around to look at Kol. "What exactly do you mean by 'tanking' someone?"

Tanking someone, as it turns out, involved Kol locking them up in a tank filled with piranhas and watching them drown in a shroud of their own blood and shredded flesh, screaming and beating soundlessly against the shock-proof, twelve-inch glass.

"Is that why I'm not allowed in the third-floor pool?" Rebekah demands suspiciously, but Kol just smiles at her and refuses to say anything else.

It was a goddamn miracle, really. The Tank could talk a nun into selling children into slavery.

"On the bright side, Nik will never underestimate you again," Kol says brightly a few hours later, when they were still pacing the room trying to figure out what to do. Dawn is creeping in, the dusty stars chased away by a pink-and-purple plume, and despite hurting everywhere and being exhausted to her bones, Caroline can't find it in herself to sleep.

"Shut up, Kol," everyone says automatically, and a disgruntled Hayley grabs a sock from the floor and stuffs it into his mouth.

"Isn't that the one you used for PE yesterday…?"

"Yep," Hayley says shortly.

Kol gags.

Caroline turns away from the hideous sight, eyes screwed shut. At least we have an advantage, she reasons. The Hybrid, or Klaus, or Nik – whatever the hell he goes by – hadn't seen Rebekah, right? All he'd known was a chatty-on-the-verge-of-homicidal blonde who'd poured a vodka soda down his pants. Who also happened to be a spy.

Maybe taking Kol wasn't such a good idea, but he's leverage, if not a really annoying hostage.

"He couldn't know where we are, who we are," Caroline murmurs to herself as she paces. "Could he?"

On the bed next to Elena, Rebekah had gone very still. "Caroline, what did he say exactly?"

"Before or after the attempted torture?" she replies. Rebekah sends her a _look_ (one night stuck in a vent with Bonnie and she's already gotten the brows down) and Caroline acquiesces. "I don't know, he said I smelled quote unquote _exquisite_ and wondered where he'd smelled it before, except he said it in such a _pretentious_ way—"

"Yes, yes, I think we've already established how pompous he can be. And what did you tell him?"

"How is this even relevant?" Caroline snaps, but she must be tired, because all of them knows how it goes in debriefs. Everything comes up. Even the most miniscule of details could uncover landmines. Better safe than dead, wasn't that what they said? And even in this profession nobody was ever safe. Not really. She squares her shoulders and turns away from the window. "I don't know, some version of the truth? Did you want me to tell him _Oh I borrowed this from my friend who happens to be a spy, sorry I don't know the exact name of it, but I know it's Clinique_."

Rebekah pales. "Oh no."

"Oh no. Don't say that, Rebekah. Oh _what_?"

"Well," Rebekah begins with a stammer, "growing up, my brothers always made fun of me not being like the other girls—"

Muffled noises came from Kol from behind the sock; Hayley cocked an eyebrow and retrieves the stiletto, dangling it in his face. He narrows his eyes and shuts up.

"—so I made a big show of informing them of my, um, shall we say… _superior_ taste, and bragged about how this particular brand of perfume I wear hasn't been sold anywhere in years; mostly because I bought out the last batch of it—"

Elena interrupts, "So what you're basically saying is: we're fucked."

"Yes," Rebekah says grimly, "that sounds about right."

"_Fan_-tastic," Bonnie says, but nothing about her voice alluded to such a situation.

"He's going to come, you know," Rebekah says worriedly. "He's going to descend upon all of you." At their cache of blank looks, she shrugs and says, "It's Elijah's favourite saying."

Caroline doesn't mean to gape, but – for real? Were all of her brothers so full of it? And she's not just talking about sweaty sock stuffed into a mouth.

Elena stands. Caroline doesn't want to admit it, but there's an air of defeat about her, the way she pulls her hair into a half-hearted knot at the nape of her neck. "You know we're going to have to tell Jenna."

That was exactly the sort of thing she'd been dreading, and she closes her eyes, but she's out of birthday miracles, not that they'd helped much. Her birthday is over. Morning has come.

"Or," Bonnie begins, and all heads, including Kol's, snap towards her. She says again, "Or… we don't tell her. I mean, we could take them. Klaus works alone, right?"

"Not alone," Rebekah corrects. "With the rest of my brothers. Which is pretty much the same as working alone, now that we've taken away their hacker. He hates taking orders from anyone else, and Elijah – well, Elijah can be swayed. I think. I hope."

"No, Bon's got a point. We weren't prepared last night," Caroline says, catching on. Her pacing starts up again. "We didn't know what we were walking into, which is sloppy of us, but we know now. We have reliable intel—" she waves an arm at Rebekah, "—we have means of defense. As terrible as your brothers are, you're their _sister_, I mean, I'm sure—"

"If you think that actually means something to Nik, you're in the wrong business," Rebekah says in a small voice.

Caroline thinks about him then, not the Hybrid and not the _Nik_ that Rebekah is spitting, but Mister Quite-Fond-of-Baroque, the one who still enjoyed contemporary art without even sounding like a douche about it. She hadn't thought much about it then, had just done as she'd trained, which was not to wonder how to act in moments like that, but to _not_ act – to breathe along in the moment as though it's the most natural thing, as if that was right where she belonged.

He'd taken the Caravaggio. They'd taken his brother. Something has to give.

All at once, she just knows that he won't come. Not right away. He'd want to come, she knows, he'd want to give into his first impulse, which is probably to burn this place right to the ground, rip apart its foundations to find his brother, but the Klaus she had met last night wouldn't. The Klaus she'd met last would want to evoke some sort of response.

A rematch, she thinks. Because what happened last night, no one could have anticipated that. Haley had been right. A response, a rematch.

And that would take time, wouldn't it? They had a day. Two days, if they were lucky, and even though they haven't had much of that, she still had her friends around her, and that amounted to pretty much the same thing.

"I'll call Katherine," Elena says then, a newfound hope in her eyes. "I mean, first I have to find her, but I'll call her."

Bonnie gets to her feet as well, already pulling out a fresh uniform for the day. "One of us needs to be here at all times to watch over him. Bad sushi?"

Sure, the rest of them agree, but Caroline says, "We're still going to have to tell Jenna eventually."

"Let's just take things one at a time," Elena says, even though that's so not how they do it. Not here, Caroline thinks, not with the lives they lead, but you know what? She's just spent the night being kicked at and free-falling off the side of a building. She deserves a damn break.

The wakeup bell rings. Above her, she hears the sound of feet shuffling across the floor, shower knobs creaking, the sound of her sisters stretching out their limbs like willow trees shaking frost off after a long winter. Telling Jenna is going to be a bitch, but Hayley reaches over and squeezes her hand and somehow she's not so worried anymore.

Let him come.

She's ready for a rematch.

* * *

tbc?


End file.
